Patricia Clark

Writer, Professor, Poet in Residence at Grand Valley State University

New full-length collection (from Terrapin Books): The Canopy (2017)

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photo credit Dianne Carrol Burdick

Patricia Clark is the author of five volumes of poetry, including The Canopy and most recently Sunday Rising. She has also published two chapbooks: Wreath for the Red Admiral and Given the Trees. Her work has been featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, and has appeared in The Atlantic, Gettysburg Review, Poetry, Slate, and Stand. She was a scholar at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and has completed residencies at The MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Tyrone Guthrie Center (in County Monaghan (Ireland), and the Ragdale Colony. Awards for her work include a Creative Artist Grant in Michigan, the Mississippi Review Prize, the Gwendolyn Brooks Prize, and co-winner of the Lucille Medwick Prize from the Poetry Society of America. From 2005-2007 she was honored to serve as the poet laureate of Grand Rapids, Michigan. She is Poet-in-Residence and Professor in the Department of Writing at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. Patricia will receive the Distinguished Contribution in a Discipline Award from Grand Valley State University in Allendale, MI at an awards ceremony on February 1, 2018.

The Canopy (January 2017) from Terrapin Books

Sunday Rising (2013)

Sunday Rising, Patricia Clark’s fourth poetry collection, opens with a haunting vision of human forms risen from the underworld, figures who lean together, trying to communicate, and ending in the final section with poems that question the past, her heritage, human relationships and the meaning of loss. In between the poems of Sunday Rising explore the near worlds of Michigan, as well as the farther worlds of the Pacific Northwest, of The Netherlands and France. There are cracks, fissures, in the worlds shown here, as well as lyric exhalations rising like clouds beyond the named birds, trees and shores. Here is language that expresses her spiritual longing and moments of passion and sorrow.